I worked closely with college kids until very recently and still have a son in college. These are not the kinds of mistakes they are prone to make, or the kinds of holes in their knowledge. In other words, they are not stupid. There are some things they don't know that can strike old people as funny - the two main things that always got me were, for maybe 15 years or more now, many of them have no idea at all what carbon paper was, and have trouble understanding even when explained to them why anyone would want to use it. Also, while they know intellectually what a typewriter is, many of them have never seen one, most have never used one, and they have no intuitive sense of when it would be used. Just a few weeks ago a former student texted me, genuinely perplexed by a grad school application form that included the cryptic instructions "Do not print or hand write". After she went on for some minutes with her frustration as to how she was supposed to fill it out since it was not provided in any electronic form and prohibited being filled in by hand, I just said "you need a typewriter". She was quiet for a thoughtful minute and said "Oh, so that's what those are for?", I told her that they were for a lot more than filling out forms, but these days that was probably one of their last vital functions. She told me it would be easier for her to turn it into a PDF file that she could type in the blanks - and it turned out she was right.
On Thu, Nov 17, 2016 at 9:03 PM 'Dave Sikula' via TVorNotTV < [email protected]> wrote: > Is anyone else watching this? I find it stuck in a time warp, like a bunch > of Bob Hope's radio comedy writers pitched a series on "these kids today > with their computers." I've been dealing with college kids this term, and > while their pop culture knowledge doesn't go back as far as I'd like, they > don't mistake an answering machine for "a first generation iPod" or think > an atlas is "Google maps printed out." (Actual dialogue from tonight's show > (I won't dignify the lines with the word "jokes.") > > I once read a description of Hope's late 60s specials that mentioned > actors like Hope, Jackie Gleason, and Lucille Ball dressed as "hippies" and > staggering around like drunken sailors after smoking marijuana. This show > seems the 21st-century equivalent of that. > > Though, I suppose given CBS's demo, this seems like cutting-edge comedy. > > --Dave Sikula > > -- > -- > TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "TV or Not TV" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected] > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected] > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en > --- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "TVorNotTV" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- Sent from Gmail Mobile -- -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
